And whats funny is the man almost got away with it. Does this make the IRS look like a bunch of clowns now? NEW YORK (April 16) - An unemployed man masquerading as a millionaire filed an income tax return claiming he was owed a refund of more than $1.5 million, authorities said. Turns out he almost got it, they said. Benjamin Harris, 47, of Brooklyn, was arrested and arraigned on charges of filing a false claim last year with the Internal Revenue Service. After pleading innocent, Harris was released on $10,000 bond. Defense attorney Heidi Cesare told a judge her client had made a career out of working temporary jobs, had no criminal record and had volunteered to meet with IRS investigators on tax deadline day. He soon found himself in handcuffs. ``Ironically, they scheduled (the meeting) for today, of all days,'' she said Tuesday. The IRS denied the timing was calculated. Prosecutors allege a 2001 return filed by Harris included a doctored W-2 form showing he made nearly $9 million that year as an attorney for an employment agency, Temporary Time Capitol Corp. He claimed he paid $3,196,431 in taxes and was owed $1,580,065, court papers said. Harris allegedly checked a box requesting the refund be directly deposited into his checking account at a Manhattan branch of HSBC, which was done. When he sought to withdraw money from an automatic teller machine, his bank notified him of a hold on an account that normally had an average balance of $2,000. The defendant faxed the bank a copy of the altered W-2 form ``to prove the deposit was legitimate,'' court papers said. But the bank still refused to release the money. Instead, the bank alerted the IRS to ``the unusually large deposit, which led to a federal investigation,'' the papers said. An IRS spokesman, Joseph Foy, credited the bank with being ``perceptive enough to freeze the funds and notify us.'' The investigation found that Harris, who could face up to five years in prison if convicted, had worked for Temporary Time in 2000, when his reported income was $1,061.
I read somewhere that something like 20 million people in America that should file a tax return just don't, and something like half of all tax returns have some kind of "cheat." Kind of sucks for the honest people in America supporting all the others.
